Ryan Skinner's Blog

What’s happening (that’s important) in the world of content marketing? This is your fortnightly round-up of the best of the best stuff online for marketers who think about content; for the previous “Fortnights”, go to the bottom of the post. (And for more information about what the Content Marketing Fortnight is, see my intro from the first one. Get this curated newsletter in your inbox every other week – send me a mail.)

"Lost Content" a new frontier
Many content marketers (OK, all content marketers) struggle to budget and produce all of the content that they wish they could. Mark Carroll of TMW makes a compelling case for an overlooked bounty: Archived and making-of content that’s sitting on many companies' servers; he calls it Lost Content. His deck:

Let Google+ distribute your content
Content advertising’s time has come when Google’s adopted it. Now Google plans to allow brands to take content (say an image) from their brand Google+ page and package it up into ads across their display network. It’s a simple, off-the-shelf content advertising play, backed by Google’s huge digital reach. Will this enliven Google’s morose social product? For marketers, maybe. For users, maybe not.

Forrester analysts are encouraged to “make the call” and here’s a call that is sure to invite some heated disagreement (native advertising has a way of doing that).

Today my report about native advertising came out and, if I had to bottle up the recommendation of the entire report in a two-word slogan, this would be it: Worth pursuing. That’s not “pour all your advertising dollars into it”, “go hog wild!” or any variant on that theme. By “worth pursuing”, I would say that it: a) is a very imperfect tactic, b) holds great promise, and c) requires some experience to get right.

Let’s start by assessing the promise of native advertising. What’s so great about it?

From a marketer’s perspective, the opportunity to go from a position “next to the show”, “interrupting the show” or “between the shows”, to “part and parcel of the show” is extraordinary. The church/state editorial wall that media outlets have trained advertisers to respect has become porous, and it’s the outlets themselves who are pounding holes in it (most recently, the New York Times). That change should not be underestimated.